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In Portraits by Others, a Look That Caught Avedon’s Eye

RICHARD AVEDON set the standard for portraiture and fashion photography in the second half of the 20th century, so it is no surprise that his work is sought by serious collectors. But far less well known than his soigné magazine images is that when he died in 2004 he had amassed a significant photography collection of his own.

“From the time he was 10 and the owner of a box camera,” Truman Capote wrote about Avedon in “Observations,” a book they collaborated on in 1959, “the walls of his room were ceiling to floor papered with pictures torn from magazines, photographs by Munkacsi and Steichen and Man Ray.”

If those tear sheets suggested what Avedon’s own pictures would become, the photographs he collected informed his later career.

The collection is now being sold to benefit the Avedon Foundation. Selected photographs will be shown for two weeks at the Pace/MacGill Gallery in Manhattan, beginning on Wednesday, and at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, starting Oct. 5. And a slender volume, “Eye of the Beholder: Photographs From the Collection of Richard Avedon” (Fraenkel Gallery), assembles the majority of the collection in a boxed set of five booklets: “Diane Arbus,” “Peter Hujar,” “Irving Penn,” “The Countess de Castiglione” and “Etcetera,” which includes 19th- and 20th-century photographers.

The collection reflects Avedon’s sensibility and enthusiasms, and offers a window onto a circle of friends who were as influential as he was. He and Arbus knew each other well, for example, as they were the same age and making portraits in Manhattan. His portraits and Penn’s shared the pages of Vogue magazine for several years.

Avedon believed that portraiture was performance; it wasn’t a question of the portrait being natural or unnatural but whether the performance was good or bad. “The point is that you can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface,” he wrote in “Richard Avedon: Portraits” (1993). “The surface is all you’ve got. All you can do is to manipulate that surface — gesture, costume, expression — radically and correctly.”

His collection includes many important examples of portraiture as it developed through the history of photography. In the 19th century Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) photographed the artists, writers and intellectuals of Second Empire France in a direct style that borrowed its simplicity of line from painting. Avedon’s own portraits — also a pantheon of arts and letters, but including a chronicle of the abject and unknown — evolved from Nadar’s.

A century of advances in technology allowed Avedon to do things Nadar could not, like capturing the finest detail with instantaneous exposures. Yet “Evelyn Avedon, 1975,” a portrait of his wife, echoes the guarded tenderness of “Ernestine, 1854-55,” Nadar’s portrait of his young wife that is in Avedon’s collection.

Julia Margaret Cameron photographed family members and her accomplished friends — the artists, writers, poets and thinkers of Victorian England — often as mythical figures. For a long time Avedon pursued Cameron’s 1867 portrait of John Herschel, but he could never find a print beautiful enough to acquire.

A Cameron portrait he did acquire is “Stella, 1867,” which depicts Julia Prinsep Jackson, Cameron’s niece and godchild, invoking the heroine of a 1591 poem by Philip Sydney, “Astrophel and Stella.” Jackson, who would later become the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, stares directly at the viewer in the same manner as do many of Avedon’s subjects.

August Sander, also in Avedon’s collection, approached his subjects with a clinical eye, composing a methodical catalog of professions and archetypes in the German society of the early 20th century. Arbus admired the stark simplicity of Sander’s portraiture, and you can see it in a comparison of two prints that Avedon owned, “Farm Girls, ca. 1928” by Sander, and “Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966” by Arbus. Even Arbus’s titles — categorizing rather than identifying the subject — echo Sander’s practice.

Avedon was the first to buy “A Box of Ten Photographs,” the 1970 portfolio Arbus assembled in an edition of 50 and packaged in a clear plexiglass box, designed by Marvin Israel, a friend of both Arbus and Avedon. For Avedon, Arbus crossed out the word “ten” on the cover sheet and wrote “eleven” above it, along with the footnote “especially for RA.” The 11th image, in a portfolio that includes some of her best-known images, was inscribed “At a Halloween party for mentally retarded women, a lady in a wheelchair, masked, 1969.”

“He kept it under his bed,” said Jeffrey Fraenkel, whose gallery in San Francisco represents Avedon’s work, recalling how he was once shown the portfolio during dinner at Avedon’s Manhattan home. “Dick showed me the Arbus prints, saying that she used to describe the box as ‘almost like ice.’ ”

The influence of Nadar, Cameron, Sander and Arbus is layered in Avedon’s own portraiture: the famous, the accomplished, the offbeat, the downtrodden, all photographed both as individuals and specimens simultaneously. His contribution was to reduce the picture frame to nothing but the individual: straightforward, unadorned, with no distance between subject and viewer.

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“I hate cameras,” he once wrote. “They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.”

Peter Hujar, who was younger than Avedon, photographed his own avant-garde circle of friends with a combination of Arbus’s eccentric intimacy and Avedon’s graphic elegance. “Peter saw himself as a portraitist and believed that the camera could see things about people that the naked eye could not,” Stephen Koch, a writer and executor of the Hujar estate, said. “A portrait could show that.”

In 1967 Hujar attended a photographer’s master class offered by the New School at Avedon’s studio, which also included Arbus and Lucas Samaras. For a while, Mr. Koch said, Avedon and Hujar were close, and their phone conversations would sometimes last until dawn.

Over time Avedon bought eight Hujar photographs. “It meant a great deal to Peter that his picture of a stripper, ‘T.C., 1976,’ hung on Avedon’s wall next to Cameron’s picture of her niece,” Mr. Koch said.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue documented his French upper-class world with photographs like “Anna La Pradvina, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911,” which depicts an elegant woman draped in furs walking her two small, overbred dogs on a Paris street. It’s just the kind of picture Avedon might have taken — it has the same panache as the fashion pictures he so carefully constructed to look authentic — and you immediately see why it’s in his collection.

When Avedon first discovered Lartigue’s work in 1963, he sent a letter to Lartigue in Paris: “The other day Mr. Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City showed me your photographs,” Avedon wrote. “It was one of the most moving and powerful experiences of my life. Seeing them was for me like reading Proust for the first time. You brought me into your world, and isn’t that, after all, the purpose of art.”

He and Lartigue met in 1966, and Avedon later edited the book “Diary of a Century: Jacques-Henri Lartigue,” published in 1970 and still an essential reference.

Not long before he died, Avedon bought 18 photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, mistress to Napoleon III, by Pierre-Louis Pierson, considered the most important collection of this series in private hands. Among them is one of the most famous portraits in the history of photography: “Scherzo di Follia, 1863-66” (“Game of Madness”). The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a later print, but Avedon’s is one of only two known early prints.

The Countess de Castiglione collaborated with Pierson to construct her many guises in the photographs, with wit, flair and a nod to the artifice of the creation, the same thing Avedon had done in his early fashion tableaus. In both his fashion work and his portraiture, Avedon explored the form of photography as much as the subject of his photographs.

“When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots,” he wrote in “Richard Avedon: Portraits.” “We really planned them. We made compositions. We dressed up. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren’t ours. We borrowed dogs. All the photographs in our family album were built on some kind of lie about who we were, and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Avedon Eye, Trained on Faces Captured By Others. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe